Mary Seacole

The Mary Seacole building offers students a range of modern facilities including a gym, resource rooms, practice rooms with a range of training aids, specialist laboratories with modern learning equipment, an art room, keep-living suite, observation rooms, facilities for PhD researchers, and work rehabilitation rooms. The building is home to students and staff from the College of Health and Life Sciences. The design of the building helps occupants keep cool. A night purge system lets automated windows open to release heat trapped during the day, helping to cool the building without the use of conventional air conditioning. This system is used in several buildings across campus.

Night-time cooling, or night-time purging uses the thermal mass of a building to absorb heat gains during the day, then cools the mass at night using external air and discharging accumulated heat to the outside so the temperature of the thermal mass is lowered ready for the next day. In Mary Seacole this reduces internal temperature rises during the day by around 3 to 6°C.